Under the Influence

I'm thinking about the way we fall under the influence of pedagogies and writing theories. I'm thinking about the ways in which our assignments serve as evidence of our theoretical/methodological orientations. Was it James Berlin: "We all teach the writing process, the question is which process we're teaching"? Something along those lines.

Take my Research Project 1 from ENGL 230, fall 2009. This hit me just the other day, that this assignment straddles two ways of seeing or of thinking about writing. How so? On one hand, I am asking students to go out and talk to a professional person, to learn about the kind(s) of writing he or she does on the job. This assignment is a reflection of the new me and by new me, I mean, the me that thinks about discourse communities, activity theory, rhetorical genre theory, Beaufort, World's Apart, etc. I want students to listen to someone talk about the role of workplace writing in their experience. Workplace writing, in and of itself, this is something that belongs to the new me.

But then, in the middle section of this assignment, I fall back on the old me. The old me is write-to-learn, process, Murray, reflection, Bonnie, UNH, etc. So, there is this section:

In the section of your Progress Report called “Work Completed,” draw on your interview transcript and the documents your participant shared with you to respond to the following questions:

1. What was the most interesting thing you learned about a) the work your participant does, b) the role of writing in your participant’s work?
2. As regards the work and the writing your participant does, what surprised or intrigued you?
3. What additional questions do you wish you had asked or would ask, now, having had some time to type up the transcript and reflect on the interview process?

Now, here, I am asking students to reflect, and this is good, but what I AM NOT asking them to do is to tie their reflection to Writing in the Real World or to any of the terminology that they have been learning. This is a HUGE error on my part (and if I'm smart, I'll revise that assignment sheet before they do this part of the project). In these questions, I fall back on those three portfolio reflection questions (what did you learn, what surprised you, what would you do differently?) that Bonnie first gave me way back in 1996! If I was thinking like the new me, I would have asked a different set of questions. I would have asked, for example, what did you learn about the unique communication patterns of the discourse community of which your participant is a member? I would have asked, what are the specific genres of writing your participant produces in his/her discourse community? I might have asked the students to inquire about the low-status or high-status texts that their participant produces. I might have asked them to ask about...and here it is, right? I could have asked them draw on the five knowledge domains--I could have and should have had the students organize their questions (and so it's not just this part of the assignment that is the problem, but also the interview questions themselves)--I could have had the students ask questions about the kinds of subject matter knowledge, rhetorical knowledge, genre knowledge, writing process knowledge and discourse community knowledge their participants have gained in their particular workplaces. I should have made an explicit connection between that diagram on p. 64 of the book and the interview questions and also the write-up of the report. Instead, I fell back on three questions that are very familiar to me.

So, what I'm intrigued by tonight is the idea of liminal states--of the way we fall under the influence of theories, of how hard it is to shake a theoretical or pedagogical orientation. The assignment sheet for Research Project 1 is a fascinating illustration of my own theoretical/pedagogical movement or transition or journey--and perhaps of the way it is not yet complete.

So, I'm thinking about assignment sheets, the genre of the assignment sheet and what they reveal about our journeys--where we have been and where we are going. Who has done research on the genre of the assignment sheet (and now I'm thinking like the new me again)? It's the things that are inscribed on those sheets, what we see when/if we read them between the lines, as I am able to do with my own for Research Project 1.